Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Dame Valerie doco heartwarming
(M, 93 mins) Directed by Briar March
Reviewed by
There haven’t been many more successful athletes from any country, in any sport – than Dame Valerie Adams.
Adams competed at five consecutive Olympic Games and won medals at four, in 2008, 2012, 2016 and the Covid-delayed 2020 event. Two of those medals were gold.
She had an unbeaten streak across more than 100 competitions – with 57 of those wins at ‘‘elite’’ level. She has won world championships at youth, junior and senior level and was consistently one of the world’s greatest shot putters pretty much every year for a decade or more.
Very few athletes ever dominated their field, for as long as Adams did with shot put.
On retiring in 2022, Adams was appointed to High Performance Sport New
Zealand. She was made a Dame, being awarded the DNZM, in 2017.
If all this new documentary from filmmaker Briar March did, was to present us with Adams’ achievements on the field and in public life, it would still be a very worthwhile way to spend 90 minutes of your life.
But, the kaupapa of the film is in the title. Valerie Adams: More Than Gold takes its name from an indelible moment towards the end of the film. Adams is at the Tokyo Olympics. The battle to even get there has been immense. Speaking to an interviewer, Adams holds up a photo of her two young children and tells us what they mean to her. There are tears streaming down her face. I wasn’t far off doing the same.
March constructs this film beautifully. We open and close on scenes of Adams visiting her mother’s grave. She cleans and tidies the site, trims the grass and leaves fresh flowers. As she is readying to leave, Adams tells her mother that she will be away for four months.
Adams is heading into a series of camps and competitions that will hopefully lead her to a place in Tokyo. March tracks her across these months, but into this intense and eventful short narrative, she weaves the longer, slower rhythms of Adams’ life story. Which is mostly pretty astonishing.
Adams is one of – probably – 18 siblings. Youngest brother Steven shows up to fill in a few details of their young life, as do two of Adams’ sisters. It’s a story of love, faith and material poverty, out of which emerged a family of big, confident and ebullient individuals, all of whom excelled at sport.
As an adult, Adams has had her own marriages – one bad, one fantastic – and a shocking series of health challenges.
The ruptured discs that plague her lower back I had heard about. But Adams also lived through complications after a Caesarian birth that left her right at the edge of death and in need of major surgery. And this all occurred only 18 months before the Tokyo games.
Valerie Adams: More Than Gold is a terrific piece of work. Words like ‘‘inspiring’’ and ‘‘heartwarming’’ get regularly dragged out for biographical documentaries, but More Than Gold is the real deal. This is a beautifully well-constructed, modest, intelligent and illuminating film that you will be very happy you took the time to see.